News and Events

Inside the Classroom: Evil & Redemption

A new special topic course is offered this Spring Quarter, provided by Dr. Michael Reid Trice, Assistant Professor of Practical Theology in addition to serving as Assistant Dean of Ecumenical & Interreligious Dialogue.

Dr. Trice shares about the nuances that are addressed throughout STMM 593-01: "To Hell and Back: Evil and Redemption in Christian Thought."

"Loss happens. Humans undergo tragedy and suffering, and we have a long tradition of identifying the realities of evil in everyday life, from Augustine to Hannah Arendt and beyond. The course begins with a systematic theological approach to evil and reimagines our language for identifying suffering, tragedy, and evil today. The course ends with a group project on becoming a ‘religious first-responder’ where tragic events take place in our world today.

Religious leadership speaks to reconciliation and redemption in daily life. And yet, what are we being reconciled from? Unless we have a robust and relevant understanding of the conditions of our humanity today, we will have a thin and marginal understanding of reconciliation itself. Genocides, teenagers with high-powered weapons in elementary schools, ethnic cleansing, and domestic violence all require responses from religious leaders today. And, those responses must be integrated into the whole of the human life, must take suffering seriously in its particularity, must be coherent to the world we live in, and sometimes must help in reimagining building blocks to hope and love. We study Ireneaus to James Baldwin, Wendy Farley to Gustavo Gutierrez, unpacking this concept of evil in the world today, right up to the 21st century and perhaps even beyond."